RIZWANA SHEIK UMAR
Taxpayers are paying for two security companies to do the same job at King Edward VIII Hospital in Durban.
The Department of Health suspended Kekana Protection Services last month and replaced them with LK Security Solutions.
Kekana, though, insist their contract is still valid and have refused to leave the hospital premises.
The health MEC, Dr Sibongiseni Dhlomo, has until August 25 to explain to the Durban High Court why he terminated the company’s services – Kekana claims in court papers that they were fired because they exposed corruption at the hospital.
In February the contracts of six security companies were terminated by the provincial health department after a three-month investigation into fraud and irregular conduct.
The companies, providing services at 17 hospitals and 77 clinics, offices and mortuaries across KwaZulu-Natal, were asked to vacate the sites they worked at within 24 hours.
The department’s investigation was prompted by the theft of seven computers stolen from Ngwelezane Hospital, near Empangeni, and after a patient disappeared from that hospital – and was later found dead in the hospital grounds.
Kekana went to court last month to stop the termination and to ensure they were paid.
The company has called on Dhlomo to explain why the two officials from his department should not be imprisoned for ignoring a High Court order compelling the department to pay the company more than R315 000 for providing access control at King Edward VIII Hospital last month.
The court also ordered the department not to suspend the company’s services pending a review of the department’s decision to terminate their contract.
Department spokesman, Chris Maxon, said
LK Security Solutions was given a six-month contract to provide security at King Edward VIII Hospital.
Kekana claims they were instrumental in rooting out corruption at King Edward and this prompted the termination of their services.
Kekana’s owner, Rachel Kekana, said in an affidavit that when the contract was first signed in August 2001, it was agreed it would run for an indefinite period.
She said the contract ran smoothly for almost eight years, until her employees started to notice behaviour from hospital staff which was “not consistent with an entity wanting to root out crime and corruption”.
The removal of the hospital’s “in-house” security in September 2009, placed enormous pressure on her company whose core function was access control, Kekana said.
She said after the removal of the in-house security by the department, theft and crime levels at the hospital began to rise.
In court papers, Kekana outlined discrepancies noticed by her employees in the forms for the removal of scrapped goods.
Goods worth thousands of rand were being “sold” for a few hundred rand and removed from the hospital premises using the same “Passout form for scrapped goods”.
The theft of copper pipes was also a major problem, Kekana said.
After an investigation by her company, two workshop staff were arrested. No sanction was placed on the employees and they were allowed to return to work.
Kekana said the efforts of her employees to root out corruption had been met with resistance from senior staff at King Edward.